THE day after Mitt Romney declared he was running for president last week, his wife Ann went on breakfast television to talk about living with multiple sclerosis. She was frank and dignified, talking about the “times in my life when I was so weakened by it and so fatigued that I couldn’t function at all”.

Romney, a mother of five boys, said she has used yoga, Pilates and horse riding, as well as attention to diet, to reduce the progression of the disease. “It was pretty frightening,” she admitted. “If you were to look at me, you would not see that there is anything wrong, but you don’t know that behind my back I’m carrying my bag of rocks. And now I look at everyone and think, they’ve got their own bag of rocks” — whether death, illness or divorce or depression.

“It’s just made me a little bit more compassionate and a little bit less judgmental,” Romney said.

Few people outside her circle of friends knew she had MS. But in the glare of a presidential campaign it has become essential to bare all. “Every medical incident and every personal example of adversity has to be discovered, disclosed and analysed. It’s become part of our confessional culture,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, co-author of One Nation Under Therapy.

When Laura Bush, the first lady, had an operation to remove a small skin cancer tumour from her shin last autumn the White House was berated for not disclosing her condition immediately. Tony Snow, the president’s spokesman, was appalled by the intrusion. “She said ‘it’s no big deal’. We knew it was no big deal at the time.”

Wives who keep silent risk the information being leaked in ways damaging to their husbands. Ann Romney went public about her illness to reassure voters that Mitt was determined to stand for president, come what may.

Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain, found during the 2000 presidential campaign that her former addiction to painkillers after a back injury was splashed all over the tabloids. It emerged that she had stolen drugs from her own charity, the American Voluntary Medical Team, in the late 1980s and only when she tearfully admitted her failings on breakfast television did the story die down.

In 2004 she had a minor stroke because of high blood pressure that initially caused her speech problems and memory loss. On that occasion McCain went on CNN’s Larry King Show to talk about it. “I was sure I was going to die,” she said. “What kept going through my mind was I hadn’t said enough to those that I loved.”

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, recently published a moving book about surviving breast cancer and the tragic loss in a car crash of Wade, her 16-year-old son.

Even Hillary Clinton has a spouse with health problems, who is certain to give at least one detailed account of undergoing a quadruple heart bypass at some point during the campaign. “It has become an essential rite of passage for first ladies,” said Hoff Sommers — and, she might have added, first gentlemen.

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